SimonM7

Saints Row: The Third, and before that Portal 2, for sure. For me, games that make me smile is a very particular category. One where something just oozes charm and fun and... a kind of warmth. I found The Third genuinely endearing, which is probably the last thing anyone expects to say about that game.

@Kierkegaard said:

To be brief, the problem is not lack of clothing, the problem is not depiction of sexual assault, the problem is not a man killing women, the problem is how those things are treated and combine.

In the Hitman trailer, sexuality (the male gaze of the camera, the tight leather outfits, the naught nurse motif) is blended with horrible, shocking violence (shots through one woman into another, the women themselves being armed, crushing a woman's nose in). Combining sex and violence, connecting them, is part of a culture of rape. It makes dominance and control and harm part of something that should include none of those things intrinsically. Yeah, you can have BDSM, but that's consensual. As just one example of thousands (Bayonetta, Hitgirl), the trailer was a good example of how wrong a message marketing can send.

In Tomb Raider, the problem is not the existence of rape, the problem is using rape as a catalyst for character growth. It makes a woman growth because of what is done to her, rather than because of what she does. It makes her growth reactive rather than proactive.

It's interesting to hear about this stuff from someone who at least understands both perspectives. Prior to reading this I didn't really know what the argument was.

I wonder, though, what the difference is between Lara growing as a character because of other hardships - surviving a life threatening situation, be it combating starvation or bodily harm - and the threat of rape. How is one adversity allowed to prompt character growth, and the other isn't? Her character doesn't set out to learn how to survive in the wilderness; her situation on the whole is accidental. Challenges come before her, and she has to deal with them. I genuinely don't see the difference.

EDIT: Holy crap, this thread was like a bajillion pages longer than I thought. I bet this has already been fully addressed. Sorry about that. :O

One problem is that a lot of players today aren't actually players at all. Games are approached by millions as entertainment, not as a challenge. It's enough to ask them to keep track of plot points in a film, but there isn't a test halfway in that dictates whether the film continues or not.

There's such a distinct difference in attitude, and growing up during the rise of cinematic experiences and Grand Theft Auto begs the question how you're even gonna know to appreciate properly steering a platforming jump to land on a small platform, guiding coloured blocks so they fit together, or working out a puzzle by putting some thought into it. Hell, Uncharted makes puzzles into IKEA couches you assemble from the on screen manual, and I'm not even knocking Uncharted when I say that, I'm just illustrating what kind of an audience developers generally expect.

Metroid, to a majority of the gaming population today, is ostensibly about simulating the context of being a "badass space bounty hunter". The minutia of the game is of no consequence. In fact, the obstacle they fight to overcome with the greatest ferocity is *the part where it's a video game*. Why would they remember a component of the game's ecosystem voluntarily?

Tutorials today feel like they underline the gameplay components that players will inevitably need down the line, in a way that they can barely fluke their way through it. It's a funny coincidence that Brad Shoemaker on this very site made it abundantly clear that he had no idea what Ryan was refering to with one of the *first strategies introduced in Trials Evolution*, and had to have an on couch training session with Ryan's direction in the second video. It may be depressing that tutorials are so intrusive these days, but many players will even go through them without learning anything.

AAAH! STOP THAT GUY HE'S MAKING THIS TOO INTERESTING!

Prolly the reasoning.

This really mostly happens to me when I really liked a flawed first attempt at something, and when they miraculously get a second shot at it they manage to screw that up too. Full Auto -> Full Auto 2 for instance.

But it also happens when one game borders on perfect and the second just needs to tighten the bolts, then tightens the wrong bolts and heads off in a direction that completely voids what the first game did right. InFamous 2 - while far, far, far from catastrophic or even mildly bad - is one of the most frustrating, heartbreaking things of the year for me. They had it in the bag with 1, all they needed to do was giving it some loving, lush presentation. Instead they borked the power progression, removed some of the most satisfying components of 1, added wobbly, "cinematic" and disorienting melee, and set it in a more visually striking but decidedly less interesting city in terms of level geometry. The fact is, InFamous 2 is probably exactly as good as 1, but in different areas, having cocked up many things 1 had locked down. Audible sigh.

Then there's the kind of sequel where they're way more excited about this other thing than the one you liked about the first one. Mass Effect 1 had adventure/branching choice bits and looty (flawed as its loot system was) exploration. Loved that. BioWare loved the part where it was about a space monster that you had to fight, and made 2 where they dumped the loot, made branching choice about GENOCIDE YES/NO, and in the stead of meddling with somewhat convincingly organic planet/city politics you SAVE THE UNIVERSE SOME MORE, now with MORE EMPHASIS ON THE PART WHERE YOU SAVE THE UNIVERSE. Oh and Uncharted 2 was about systematically having things fall down when you jumped off them. I kinda liked the part where I fell down if I didn't jump off a falling thing in 1, but that's me.

I feel bad for talking about really really good games.. apart from Full Auto which was wonky but ace.. but disappointment doesn't really signal one thing or another about quality. You can be disappointed in a pair of COMPLETELY SICK SOCKS when you open your presents at christmas, too. Like, way improved socks over their predecessor, really.

Well I find that if I base the categories soley on what I have on Steam I keep running into eventually having to re-organise everything when I buy more and more diverse things and the categories are either too broad or not broad enough.

In fact I think that's probably the issue video games have in general. Most of the established genres were invented when games were a tiny fraction of what they eventually became and are still becoming. As a remnant of the past two-ish generations we're hamfistedly dealing with "open world" being a "genre" as games at large convert or move into that genre - or absorb it, depending on how you look at it - and meanwhile fitting into a different genre all together. How isn't Skyrim "open world"? And hey, is Deus Ex an "FPS"? "FPS" is theoretically one of the most distinctly awkward genre propositions as people are hell bent on associating it with shooting. That's a valid hell bender I suppose with the "shooter" being in the name, but then guns determine whether a first person perspective passes for FPS or not.

Maybe it's time to take a few steps back and look at the broader themes of games. Mechanics are absolutely instrumental in conveying what a game is essentially about and whatever themes are only part of it, but surely an "action" movie moniker doesn't distinguish enough between Terminator 2 and... Skyline.. to be a satisfying representation for the entire thing either?

I'm wrestling my Steam categories as the number of games in them is rapidly increasing, and doing this later rather than sooner is just a matter of exponential increase in headache. Faced with this I came upon the age (well, decade-ish) old question of how to properly categorise games in general, only now it felt more pressing due to the practical application.

Basically, what I'm asking is how do you divide video games into genres? In your mind or otherwise. There are all sorts of fundamental and logistical problems with trying to do it, but there are irrefutable benefits in coming up with something that clicks, that works. So please have at it, I'm really looking forward to any responses!

It's actually extremely simple. Aside from a welcome toning down of the sincere GANSTAH stuff and going above and beyond with the ridiculousness, Saint's Row: The Third - purely in terms of *content* - is a worse game than Saints Row 2 was. The story is disjointed and sometimes outright leaves stuff to happen off cam, with major events only vaguely alluded to eventually. The number of stores, items and customization options are fewer (although making a nice looking character is definitely easier because for one thing SR2's haircuts all looked like garbage) and while memorable things will happen, there's no real coherency or meat to the story and narrative - which is fine for what it is, but well below the relatively epic standards set by 2.

With that out of the way, Saints Row: The Third is the infinitely better video game. It plays genuinely great, rendering SR2 almost unplayable in retrospect. Viewed purely from a gameplay perspective there is absolutely no contest.

There's no inherent problem with SR3's story being ludicrous - unless you have a specific problem with silly things happening - but it has what can only be described as gigantic gaps in it. The characters - especially the rival gangs - are never established or fleshed out like they were in SR2, and that is a much more damning thing to it than the tonal shift, which frankly is a welcome change from what was ostensibly obligated to be a druggy, hoe-y, pimpy ganstah thing rather than convincingly excited to be.

With 4 I wish the same amount of care is shown to the characters and the weaving together the story - no matter how outlandish it may be - and perhaps with the money and resources saved on canning the Red Faction franchise they can approach the over abundance of content and diversity that SR2 had. Meanwhile, if you want content and - if somewhat more grounded - a meaty and deliciously busy storyline, 2's your game. If you want to play the better video game, The Third is honest, gameplay-centric fun to a degree the franchise's rather embarassingly GTA derived roots could never, ever have prepared you for.

Trust the internet (oh and Square I guess) to infuse a statement like "2.5" or "2-2" with enough meaning to propel a thread to 70 replies.

You put a number on it to distinguish it from the last, it's really not complicated. Hell, even Men in Black 2 which is almost literally MiB in reverse is a sequel. Also, Street Fighter 2 is a sequel to Street Fighter 1! That's not some sort of.. beyond sequel sequel just because it's *really* different. More like Street Fighter 3 - 0,5! Right!? ...Right? Come on! Let's invent another convoluted non-thing!

It's hardly a demand when it's about keeping the quality *the same as before*. Jeff has gone on and on about how they don't want to gate people off, but rather offer incentives to pay. Well this is exactly the kind of rug pulling he was specifically saying they wouldn't do.

The hilarious thing is how unfavourably it compares to actual youtube content. Every day users pump out similar quick looks at 720p or above on youtube without asking a penny for it, because that's literally a standard feature of that site. So here we're downgraded from the site's baseline quality as the content is moved OFF of GB servers onto a completely different site whose content is more or less always twice the resolution.

And it's not even about 720p, it's about how QLs now all look like garbage compared to before. With the Whiskey Media player the low resolution content was saved by great - or low - compression. Now even TRAILERS FOR VIDEO GAMES, hosted ENTIRELY BY YOUTUBE, containing absolutely ZERO GB CONTENT are streamed on this site as 360p compressed artifact orgies. Of course the funny tangental thing is that you can go to youtube and a different channelon there to see it in 1080p if you want.

I love this site, I love the content it produces and I love the staff, but this is hard to interpret as anything but a backhanded way of sticking non-paying members with basically *the worst quality gaming related videos on the internet* while maintaining that no content has been gated off.